People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [265]
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. . . .
Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” evoked memories—all different, all the same—out of every black American’s childhood:
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
At the time of the Scottsboro Boys incident, Cullen wrote a bitter poem noting that white poets had used their pens to protest in other cases of injustice, but now that blacks were involved, most were silent. His last stanza was:
Surely, I said,
Now will the poets sing.
But they have raised no cry.
I wonder why.
Even outward subservience—Uncle Tom behavior in real situations, the comic or fawning Negro on the stage, the self-ridicule, the caution—concealed resentment, anger, energy. The black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, in the era of the black minstrel, around the turn of the century, wrote “We Wear the Mask”:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
. . . We sing, but oh, the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
Two black performers of that time played the minstrel and satirized it at the same time. When Bert Williams and George Walker billed themselves as “Two Real Coons,” they were, Nathan Huggins says, “intending to give style and comic dignity to a fiction that white men had created. . . .”
By the 1930s the mask was off for many black poets. Langston Hughes wrote “I, Too.”
I, too, sing America
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes. . . .
Gwendolyn Bennett wrote:
I want to see lithe Negro girls,
Etched dark against the sky
While sunset lingers. . . .
I want to hear the chanting
Around a heathen fire
Of a strange black race. . . .
I want to feel the surging
Of my sad people’s soul
Hidden by a minstrel-smile.
There was Margaret Walker’s prose-poem “For My People”:
. . . Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth, let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control!
By the 1940s there was Richard Wright, a gifted novelist, a black man. His autobiography of 1937, Black Boy, gave endless insights: for instance, how blacks were set against one another, when he told how he was prodded to fight another black boy for the amusement of white men. Black Boy expressed unashamedly every humiliation and then:
The white South said that it knew “niggers,” and I was what the white South called a “nigger.” Well, the white South had never known me—never known what I thought, what I felt. The white South said that I had a “place” in life. Well, I had never felt my “place”; or, rather, my deepest instincts had always made me reject the “place” to which the white South had assigned me. It had never occurred to me that I was in any way an inferior being. And no word that I had ever heard fall from the lips of southern white men had ever made me really doubt the worth of my own humanity.
It was all there in the poetry, the prose, the music, sometimes masked, sometimes unmistakably